Love changes over time—and so do those who love. The love of newlyweds is different from the love of a couple who has been through years of life’s ups and downs together. The love of parents for a newborn is different from the love for that same child now grown. The scope and feeling of their love expand.
A father wondered if he would love his second child as much as his first. But he does. A wife looks back on how she thought she could never feel more in love with her husband than on the day she married him. But she does. Love increases as we continue to open our hearts to another; it deepens as we serve and sacrifice for each other. When we choose to love and stay in love, we grow. At the celebration of her 50th wedding anniversary, one woman was asked how she could love the same man all these years. Without a moment’s pause, she replied, “He’s not the same man.”
Love’s power to transform is one of life’s sweetest miracles. Have you noticed that love for a person generates more love within that person? And that love works a mighty change. When there is love, there is beauty. When there is love, hope replaces discouragement and faith removes fear. When there is love, there is more kindness in the home and forgiveness in the heart. Love is the fountain from which all virtue is nourished.
A visitor to a hospital waiting room remembers an elderly couple, “The man was in a wheelchair, his wife sitting next to him in the visitors’ room. For the half hour that I watched they never exchanged a word, just held hands and looked at each other, and once or twice the man patted his wife’s face. The feeling of love was so thick in that room that I felt I was sharing in their communion and was shaken all day by their pain, their love, something sad and also joyful: the fullness of a human relationship.”[1]
Love gives meaning to life. It’s what keeps us going when we feel like giving up; it can be what gets us up in the morning, and what settles us into sweet dreams when we sleep. Our efforts to nurture love would fail were it not for infusions of divine love along the way. Ultimately, all love comes from God. The more we seek Him, the more we will feel His love working a mighty change in our hearts—and in the hearts of those we love.
Program #3887
[1] Spiritual Literacy, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Touchstone, NY, NY, 1998, 436